Croke Park to turn green and yellow as neighbours Glen and Dunloy aim for double Ulster success

From the Dunloy hurlers' mid-Antrim base to Maghera, home of the Watty Grahams, Glen club across the Derry border, is less than 20 miles.

Fri, 20 Jan, 2023 - 06:43

Paul Keane

In a couple of pockets of Cork city they have a strong sense of just how exciting a week this is for the Dunloy and Glen clubs up in Ulster.

From the Dunloy hurlers' mid-Antrim base to Maghera, home of the Watty Grahams, Glen club across the Derry border, is less than 20 miles.

Only a few kilometres separated Glen Rovers from Nemo Rangers (1973) and Blackrock from Nemo Rangers (1979) when those clubs won AIB All-Ireland club titles but it'll still feel like a little corner of Ireland fighting its corner when Dunloy and Glen supporters pitch up at Croke Park on Sunday.

Particularly so for Glen captain Connor Carville whose girlfriend happens to hail from Dunloy.

"She's buzzing and so are her family, she's getting a half-and-half jersey made up for Sunday," smiled Carville.

"They're hurling mad up there in Dunloy and it's a nice coincidence as well that it's green and yellow for Dunloy and green and yellow for Glen."

Both teams are considerable underdogs - you will get odds of around 22/1 on the two returning north with the silverware - though whatever about Dunloy who are aiming to avoid five hurling final defeats from five appearances, Glen will be more than happy to be written off. It is their natural state, as Carville outlined when he lifted the Seamus McFerran Cup after winning the Ulster final and told the crowd how for years they were considered 'underachievers' with a soft core.

"You would have heard people telling you that Glen would never win a (Derry) championship, that we had no leaders and that we were mentally weak," said Carville. "I suppose at times as well you exaggerate these things and you try to use them for your own benefit and for your own motivation.

"In fairness, Glen hadn't won anything. We hadn't won any county titles at senior level until 2021 and people were probably justified in saying that we were all those things. But I don't think they can say that now."

Powered on by one of the best midfield pairings in the country, club or county, All-Star Conor Glass and Derry's Emmet Bradley, and with Malachy O'Rourke on the sideline, nobody underestimates the Maghera side anymore.

The success isn't any great surprise either, only that it took this long to materialise. The club won four Ulster club minor championships in a row between 2011 and 2014. When they beat Slaughtneil in the 2021 county final to claim their first ever senior championship win, 15 of the 20 players used that day had at least one Ulster minor medal. Defender Carville was on the field for two of those minor wins though traces the development of this exceptional group back even further, to their earliest years.

"A big factor is that a lot of the lads grew up together and would be very close with each other," explained the 28-year-old.

"I remember coming home from school, I'd fire the schoolbag away and run over to Emmet Bradley's house. Emmet, Ryan Dougan, Michael Warnock and myself would all be battering into eachother in the backyard, playing football non-stop."

Carville didn't realise it but something similar was going on elsewhere in Maghera at the same time.

"There's a row of about eight houses in Maghera called Hall Street and probably five of our panel came from that row of houses," he said. "They were rattling into eachother in their backyards as well."

To harness all of that potential the club decided to put an increased emphasis on kicking and tackling, two absolute fundamentals of the game.

"They looked at some of the best teams in Ireland and I think they took a lot of inspiration from the likes of Crossmaglen, who had won all around them at club level," said Carville.

"You can still see that we're good at tackling, which is something we would focus on. The way the game has changed in recent years, you don't get as many opportunities to kick the ball. But they were definitely two of the big focuses for Glen."

Glass has brought a little chutzpah to the arrangement, former Monaghan manager O'Rourke and his management team the poise and preparation. And here they are now, an hour from matching what Ballinderry, Lavey and Bellaghy famously did in the past and what, just as significantly, great sides from Ballerin and Slaughtneil didn't.

"With Glen never having won a county title before (2021), winning a county title was always our big aim," said Carville.

"We didn't allow ourselves to think very far beyond that. Once we won that first one in 2021, you were then thinking, 'Right, where can we go from here?' All we want to do is try to realise our potential. It has got us this far and we'll see if it can take us any further."